2.1. Arhitecturi suportate

The following are the officially supported architectures for Debian
8:

32-bit PC ('i386') and 64-bit PC ('amd64')

64-bit ARM ('arm64')

ARM (EABI) („armel”)

ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, „armhf”)

MIPS („mips” (big-endian) și „mipsel” (little-endian))

PowerPC („powerpc”)

64-bit little-endian PowerPC ('ppc64el')

IBM System z („s390x”)

Three architectures which were part of Debian 7 are not released
with jessie.

As announced when Debian 7 was released, the 32-bit s390 port is discontinued and replaced with
s390x.

In addition, the ports to IA-64 and Sparc had to be removed from this
release due to insufficient developer support. Sparc had been a supported
architecture in Debian since 2.1 (1999), while ia64 was introduced in Debian 3.0 (2002).

Finally, the Debian ports to the FreeBSD kernel, kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386, included as technology previews in
Debian 6.0 and Debian 7, are not part of this release.

2.2. Noutăți în distribuție

This new release of Debian again comes with a lot more software than its
predecessor wheezy; the distribution includes over 12253
new packages, for a total of over 43512 packages. Most of the
software in the distribution has been updated: over 24573
software packages (this is 66% of all packages in
wheezy). Also, a significant number of packages (over
5441, 14% of the packages in
wheezy) have for various reasons been removed from the
distribution. You will not see any updates for these packages and they will
be marked as 'obsolete' in package management front-ends; see Secțiune 4.10, „Pachete învechite”.

Debian again ships with several desktop applications and environments.
Among others it now includes the desktop environments
GNOME 3.14,
KDE 4.11,
Xfce 4.10, and
LXDE.

2.2.1. CDs, DVDs, and BDs

The official Debian distribution now ships on 9 to 10 binary
DVDs or 75
to 85 binary CDs
(depending on the architecture)
and 10 source DVDs or 59 source
CDs. Additionally, there is a
multi-archDVD, with a subset of the
release for the amd64 and i386
architectures, along with the source code. Debian is also released as
Blu-ray
(BD) images, 2 each for the amd64 and
i386 architectures, or 2 for the source code. For size
reasons, some very large packages are omitted from the CD
builds; these packages fit better in the DVD and
BD builds, so are still included there.

2.2.2. Changes in the GNOME desktop

Being upgraded to version 3.14, the new GNOME desktop brings many new
features and usability improvements.

The design of the GNOME shell has been updated. The bottom message tray is
larger, easier to use and less prone to appear accidentally. A new system
status area in the upper right corner puts all useful settings in the same
place.

The screensaver has been replaced by a "lock screen" that still brings
minimal functionality when the user is away. For example, you can pause the
music, be informed of a new e-mail, or change the screen brightness, all of
that without entering a password. Pressing the Escape key or starting to
type the password brings back the login prompt. The GNOME display manager
uses the exact same design for consistency.

Several applications, including the Nautilus file manager, the gedit text
editor, and the evince document viewer have seen their design made much more
compact, merging the window titlebar with the toolbar. This leaves much more
room for the documents the user is working on. The standard dialog boxes
have undergone similar changes.

Support for touch screens has been fully integrated, including intuitive
gestures based on multiple finger movements. GNOME now also supports high
resolution (HiDPI) screens, taking full advantage of fine pixeling for the
clearest rendering.

GNOME supports geolocation, and includes a smooth mapping and navigation
application.

The user documentation is much more complete, and includes video tutorials
for new users.

2.2.3. New default init system (systemd)

Introduced in Debian 7, systemd is now the default init system. It
provides advanced monitoring, logging, and service management capabilities.

While it is designed as a drop-in sysvinit replacement and as such makes use of
existing SysV init scripts, the systemd package can be installed safely
alongside sysvinit and started via
the init=/bin/systemd kernel option. The systemd-sysv package provides the
/sbin/init replacement.

2.2.4. Security

The legacy secure sockets layer protocol SSLv3 has been disabled in this
release. Many system cryptography libraries as well as servers and client
applications have been compiled or configured without support for this
protocol.

The Linux kernel features a security mechanism which nullifies many symlink
attacks. It is enabled in the Debian Linux kernel by default. /tmp-related
bugs which are rendered non-exploitable by this mechanism are not treated as
security vulnerabilities. If you use a custom Linux kernel you should enable
it using a sysctl setting:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/protected_symlinks

In some rare cases the security support for a package shipped in a Debian
release needs to be terminated prior to the end of support for the full
distribution. Jessie provides a new package (debian-security-support) which emits a warning
if support for a package needs to be terminated in advance. It also
documents packages where the scope of security support is limited. As such,
it is recommended to install debian-security-support on all
security-relevant systems.

Continuing on the path set by Wheezy, more packages have been
built with hardened compiler flags. Also, the stack protector flag has been
switched to stack-protector-strong for extra hardening. Note that the
hardened build flags are not enabled by default in gcc, so they are not used automatically when
locally building software.

New in this release is the needrestart package. When installed, it will
perform a check after each APT upgrade session. If any services running on
the system require a restart to take advantage of changes in the upgraded
packages then it offers to perform these restarts. It is recommended to
install needrestart to ensure that
security updates in libraries are propagated to running services.

2.2.5. MariaDB next to MySQL

Along with the older MySQL 5.5, Jessie ships the new MariaDB 10.0.
See the Debian MySQL Team
wiki page for more information. Only one of them is likely to be
included in Debian 9.

Note that upstream support for MySQL 5.5 will cease in December 2018 (and
Debian security support will have to follow that), while MariaDB 10.0 will
receive upstream security support until March 2019.

2.2.6. PHP applications

The Horde Application Framework is available in Jessie, via the
php-horde package.

2.2.7. Debian Games Blend

The Debian Games Team proudly presents the Debian Games Blend consisting of 33 metapackages
which simplify the installation of games per category. The selection
includes among many others strategy, simulation, card, and programming
games. Debian Games also offers developers a quick way to install
recommended software for developing games in the C++, Java, Perl, or Python
3 programming languages. Content developers will find useful tools for
creating game art in games-content-dev. The project homepage
provides screenshots and further information and offers a compact overview
about all games including Debian's finest
games.

2.2.8. News from Debian Med Blend

The Debian Med team has again considerably increased not only the number of
packages in the fields of biology and medicine but also their quality in
terms of testing (at package build time as well as autopkgtest). These
enhancements in version 2.0 of the Debian Med Blend metapackages reflect the
demand from scientists for reliable software to provide reproducible
results. Visit the Debian
Med tasks pages to see the full range of biological and medical
software in Debian.

2.2.9. News from Debian Science Blend

Due to the continuous work of the Debian Science team not only new
scientific applications were added to the Debian package pool but also new
fields of science are covered by certain applications. Visit Debian Science tasks
pages to see the full range of scientific software inside Debian.

2.2.10. News from Debian Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Blend

During the jessie development cycle many changes from UbuntuGIS were merged
back into Debian GIS. The collaboration with UbuntuGIS and OSGeo-Live
projects was improved, resulting in new packages and contributors. Visit
Debian GIS tasks
pages to see the full range of GIS software inside Debian and the
Debian GIS homepage
for more information.

2.2.11. News from the Debian Java Team

Jessie ships with 799 source packages (442 updated, +130 new ones since
Wheezy) which will be maintained by the
Java Team. Notable changes: